Healthcare delivery organizations are grappling with a growing number of challenges, including needing to become more efficient, reduce operational costs, improve patient experiences and health outcomes, and innovate in the way they provide care. With the adoption of electronic healthcare records nearing completion and the need to establish population health management programs, these healthcare delivery organizations are now seeking to transform their organizations into competitive digital businesses that demonstrate acute situational awareness and operational excellence across the entire healthcare continuum.
Existing approaches leveraged by healthcare delivery organizations to measure and monitor organizational performance focus on a strategy of building a physical implementation of a data consolidation process across a plurality of health information sources. These multiple, disparate, health information sources provide for a diverse amount of healthcare data and patient information being scattered across many different systems running on various operating systems across disparate networks, even within a single healthcare delivery organization.
Implementing a data consolidation strategy requires extracting, transforming, and loading large amounts of data scattered across disparate health information systems into a centralized repository with a unified data model. This technical approach requires healthcare delivery organizations to create, operate and maintain a data pipeline from every existing healthcare information source for subsequent loading on a regular interval into a centralized repository.
Since each health information source uses different data types and formats, healthcare delivery organizations must resolve a series of data compatibility issues before any raw data can be used for consolidated reporting.
The use of a unified data model within a centralized repository requires transforming the raw data as extracted from health information sources into an intermediate form that is significantly less flexible.
Any addition or changes to the unified data model requires healthcare delivery organizations to modify all data pipelines, transformation logic and reprocess data all while not impacting existing business operations.
Scaling a data consolidation strategy into a system-wide operation across an entire healthcare delivery organization with many multiple health information sources across various operating systems, consolidated organizational performance reporting often evolves into an untenable proposition. These complications in meaningfully and timely leveraging diverse health information sources, create operational inefficiencies and ultimately impact patient care.
Therefore, there exists a need for improved data integration relating to integrating disparate health information sources across the continuum of care.